Thomas Covenant 03: Power That Preserves

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  They would abandon him to the unreality of his passion.

  He found that he was gasping hoarsely, panting as if the air in the room were too rancid for his lungs.

  He needed—needed—

  Dialing convulsively, he called Information and got the number of the nightclub where he had gone drinking Saturday night.

  When he reached that number, the woman who answered the phone told him in a bored voice that Susie Thurston had left the nightclub. Before he could think to ask, the woman told him where the singer’s next engagement was.

  He called Information again, then put a long-distance call through to the place where Susie Thurston was now scheduled to perform. The switchboard of this club connected him without question to her dressing room.

  As soon as he heard her low, waifish voice, he panted thickly, “Why did you do it? Did he put you up to it? How did he do it? I want to know—”

  She interrupted him roughly. “Who are you? I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Who do you think you are? I didn’t do nothing to you.”

  “Saturday night. You did it to me Saturday night.”

  “Buster, I don’t know you from Adam. I didn’t do nothing to you. Just drop dead, will you? Get off my phone.”

  “You did it Saturday night. He put you up to it. You called me ‘Berek.’ ” Berek Halfhand—the long-dead hero in his dream. The people in his dream, the people of the Land, had believed him to be Berek Halfhand reborn—believed that because leprosy had claimed the last two fingers of his right hand. “That crazy old beggar told you to call me Berek, and you did it.”

  She was silent for a long moment before she said, “Oh, it’s you. You’re that guy—the people at the club said you were a leper.”

  “You called me Berek,” Covenant croaked as if he were strangling on the sepulchral air of the house.

  “A leper,” she breathed. “Oh, hell! I might’ve kissed you. Buster, you sure had me fooled. You look a hell of a lot like a friend of mine.”

  “Berek,” Covenant groaned.

  “What—‘Berek’? You heard me wrong. I said, ‘Berrett.’ Berrett Williams is a friend of mine. He and I go ’way back. I learned a lot from him. But he was three-quarters crocked all the time. Anyway, he was sort of a clown. Coming to hear me without saying a thing about it is the sort of thing he’d do. And you looked—”

  “He put you up to it. That old beggar made you do it. He’s trying to do something to me.”

  “Buster, you got leprosy of the brain. I don’t know no beggars. I got enough useless old men of my own. Say, maybe you are Berrett Williams. This sounds like one of his jokes. Berrett, damn you, if you’re setting me up for something—”

  Nausea clenched in Covenant again. He hung up the phone and hunched over his stomach. But he was too empty to vomit; he had not eaten for forty-eight hours. He gouged the sweat out of his eyes with his numb fingertips, and dialed Information again.

  The half-dried soap on his fingers made his eyes sting and blur as he got the number he wanted and put through another long-distance call.

  When the crisp military voice said, “Department of Defense,” he blinked at the moisture which filled his eyes like shame, and responded, “Let me talk to Hile Troy.” Troy had been in his dream, too. But the man had insisted that he was real, an inhabitant of the real world, not a figment of Covenant’s nightmare.

  “Hile Troy? One moment, sir.” Covenant heard the riffling of pages briefly. Then the voice said, “Sir, I have no listing for anyone by that name.”

  “Hile Troy,” Covenant repeated. “He works in one of your—in one of your think tanks. He had an accident. If he isn’t dead, he should be back to work by now.”

  The military voice lost some of its crispness. “Sir, if he’s employed here as you say—then he’s security personnel. I couldn’t contact him for you, even if he were listed here.”

  “Just get him to the phone,” Covenant moaned. “He’ll talk to me.”

  “What is your name, sir?”

  “He’ll talk to me.”

  “Perhaps he will. I still need to know your name.”

  “Oh, hell!” Covenant wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, then said abjectly, “I’m Thomas Covenant.”

  “Yes, sir. I’ll connect you to Major Rolle. He may be able to help you.”

  The line clicked into silence. In the background, Covenant could hear a running series of metallic snicks like the ticking of a deathwatch. Pressure mounted in him. The wound on his forehead throbbed like a scream. He clasped the receiver to his head, and hugged himself with his free arm, straining for self-control. When the line came to life again, he could hardly keep from howling at it.

  “Mr. Covenant?” a bland, insinuating voice said. “I’m Major Rolle. We’re having trouble locating the person you wish to speak to. This is a large department—you understand. Could you tell me more about him?”

  “His name is Hile Troy. He works in one of your think tanks. He’s blind.” The words trembled between Covenant’s lips as if he were freezing.

  “Blind, you say? Mr. Covenant, you mentioned an accident. Can you tell me what happened to this Hile Troy?”

  “Just let me talk to him. Is he there or not?”

  The major hesitated, then said, “Mr. Covenant, we have no blind men in this department. Could you give me the source of your information? I’m afraid you’re the victim of—”

  Abruptly Covenant was shouting, raging. “He fell out of a window when his apartment caught fire, and he was killed! He never even existed!”

  With a savage heave, he tore the phone cord from its socket, then turned and hurled it at the clock on the living-room wall. The phone struck the clock and bounced to the floor as if it were impervious to injury, but the clock shattered and fell in pieces.

  “He’s been dead for days! He never existed!”

  In a paroxysm of fury, he lashed out and kicked the coffee table with one numb booted foot. The table flipped over, broke the frame of Joan’s picture as it jolted across the rug. He kicked it again, breaking one of its legs. Then he knocked over the sofa, and leaped past it to the bookcases. One after another, he heaved them to the floor.

  In moments, the neat leper’s order of the room had degenerated into dangerous chaos. At once, he rushed back to the bedroom. With stumbling fingers, he tore the penknife out of his pocket, opened it, and used it to shred the bloodstained pillow. Then, while the feathers settled like guilty snow over the bed and bureaus, he thrust the knife back into his pocket and slammed out of the house.

  He went down into the woods behind Haven Farm at a run, hurrying toward the secluded hut which held his office. If he could not speak of his distress, perhaps he could write it down. As he flashed along the path, his fingers were already twitching to type out: Help me help help help! But when he reached the hut, he found that it looked as if he had already been there. Its door had been torn from its hinges, and inside the hulks of his typewriters lay battered amid the litter of his files and papers. The ruin was smeared with excrement, and the small rooms stank of urine.

  At first, he stared at the wreckage as if he had caught himself in an act of amnesia. He could not remember having done this. But he knew he had not done it; it was vandalism, an attack on him like the burning of his stables days or weeks ago. The unexpected damage stunned him. For an odd instant, he forgot what he had just done to his house. I am not a violent man, he thought dumbly. I’m not.

  Then the constricted space of the hut seemed to spring at him from all the walls. A suffocating sensation clamped his chest. For the third time, he ached to vomit, and could not.

  Gasping between clenched teeth, he fled into the woods.

  He moved aimlessly at first, drove the inanition of his bones as fast as he could deep into the woodland with no aim except flight. But as sunset filled the hills, cluttered the trails with dusk, he bent his steps toward the town. The thought of people drew him like a lure. While he stumbled through the
twilit spring evening, odd, irrational surges of hope jabbed his heart. At erratic intervals, he thought that the mere sight of a forthright, unrecriminating face would steady him, bring the extremities of his plight back within his grasp.

  He feared to see such a face. The implicit judgment of its health would be beyond his endurance.

  Yet he jerked unevenly on through the woods like a moth fluttering in half-voluntary pursuit of immolation. He could not resist the cold siren of people, the allure and pain of his common mortal blood. Help! He winced as each cruel hope struck him. Help me!

  But when he neared the town—when he broke out of the woods in back of the scattered old homes which surrounded like a defensive perimeter the business core of the small town—he could not muster the courage to approach any closer. The bright-lit windows and porches and driveways seemed impassable: he would have to brave too much illumination, too much exposure, to reach any door, whether or not it would welcome him. Night was the only cover he had left for his terrible vulnerability.

  Whimpering in frustration and need, he tried to force himself forward. He moved from house to house, searching for one, any one, which might offer him some faint possibility of consolation. But the lights refused him. The sheer indecency of thrusting himself upon unwitting people in their homes joined his fear to keep him back. He could not impose on the men and women who lived in sanctuary behind the brightness. He could not carry the weight of any more victims.

  In this way—dodging and ducking around the outskirts of the community like a futile ghost, a ghoul impotent to horrify—he passed the houses, and then returned as he had come, made his scattered way back to Haven Farm like a dry leaf, brittle to the breaking point, and apt for fire.

  At acute times during the next three days, he wanted to burn his house down, put it to the torch—make it the pyre or charnel of his uncleanness. And in many less savage moods, he ached to simply slit his wrists—open his veins and let the slow misery of his collapse drain away. But he could not muster the resolution for either act. Torn between horrors, he seemed to have lost the power of decision. The little strength of will that remained to him he spent in denying himself food and rest.

  He went without food because he had fasted once before, and that hunger had helped to carry him through a forest of self-deceptions to a realization of the appalling thing he had done to Lena, Elena’s mother. Now he wanted to do the same; he wanted to cut through all excuses, justifications, digressions, defenses, and meet his condition on its darkest terms. If he failed to do this, then any conclusion he reached would be betrayed from birth, like Elena, by the inadequacy of his rectitude or comprehension.

  But he fought his bone-deep need for rest because he was afraid of what might happen to him if he slept. He had learned that the innocent do not sleep. Guilt begins in dreams.

  Neither of these abnegations surpassed him. The nausea lurking constantly in the pit of his stomach helped him to keep from food. And the fever of his plight did not let him go. It held and rubbed him like a harness; he seemed to have the galls of it on his soul. Whenever the penury of his resources threatened him, he gusted out of his house like a lost wind, and scudded through the hills for miles up and down the wooded length of Righters Creek. And when he could not rouse himself with exertion, he lay down across the broken furniture in his living room, so that if he dozed he would be too uncomfortable to rest deeply enough for dreams.

  In the process, he did nothing to care for his illness. His VSE—the Visual Surveillance of Extremities on which his struggle against leprosy depended—and other self-protective habits he neglected as if they had lost all meaning for him. He did not take the medication which had at one time arrested the spreading of his disease. His forehead festered; cold numbness gnawed its slow way up the nerves of his hands and feet. He accepted such things, ignored his danger. It was condign; he deserved it.

  Nevertheless he fell into the same fey mood every evening. In the gloom of twilight, his need for people became unendurable; it drew him spitting and gnashing his teeth to the outer darkness beyond the home lights of the town. Night after night he tried to drive himself to the door of a home, any home. But he could not raise his courage high enough to accost the lights. People within a stone’s throw of him remained as unattainable as if they occupied another world. Each night he was thrown back for companionship on the unrelieved aspect of his own weakness—and on the throbbing ache which filled his skull as the infection in his forehead grew.

  Elena had died because of him. She was his daughter, and he had loved her. Yet he had trapped her into death.

  She had never even existed.

  He could find no answer to it.

  Then, Thursday night, the pattern of his decline was broken for him. In the process of his futile ghosting, he became aware of sounds on the dark breeze. A tone rose and fell like a voice in oratory, and between its stanzas he heard singing. Disembodied in the darkness, the voices had a tattered, mournful air, like an invitation to a gathering of damned souls—verses and chorus responding in dolor to each other. Elena had been a singer, daughter of a family of singers. Fumbling his way through the benighted outskirts of the town, he followed the reft sorrow of the music.

  It led him past the houses, around the town, down the road to the barren field which served as a parade ground whenever the town celebrated a patriotic occasion. A few people were still hurrying toward the field as if they were late, and Covenant avoided them by staying off the road. When he reached the parade ground, he found that a huge tent had been erected in its center. All the sides of the tent were rolled up, so that the light of pressure lanterns shone vividly from under the canvas.

  People filled the tent. They were just sitting down on benches after singing, and during the movement, several ushers guided the latecomers to the last empty seats. The benches faced in tight rows toward a wide platform at the front of the tent, where three men sat. They were behind a heavy pulpit, and behind them stood a makeshift altar, hastily hammered together out of pine boards, and bleakly adorned by a few crooked candles and a dull, battered gold cross.

  As the people settled themselves on the benches, one of the men on the platform—a short fleshy man dressed in a black suit and a dull white shirt—got to his feet and stepped to the pulpit. In a sonorous, compelling voice, he said, “Let us pray.”

  All the people bowed their heads. Covenant was on the verge of turning away in disgust, but the quiet confidence of the man’s tone stayed him. He listened unwillingly as the man folded his hands on the pulpit and prayed gently:

  “Dear Jesus, our Lord and Saviour—please look down on the souls that have come together here. Look into their hearts, Lord—see the pain, and the hurt, and the loneliness, and the sorrow—yes, and the sin—and the hunger for You in their hearts. Comfort them, Lord. Help them, heal them. Teach them the peace and the miracle of prayer in Thy true name. Amen.”

  Together, the people responded, “Amen.”

  The man’s voice tugged at Covenant. He heard something in it that sounded like sincerity, like simple compassion. He could not be sure; he seemed to have learned what little he knew about sincerity in dreams. But he did not move away. Instead, while the people raised their heads from prayer, he moved cautiously forward into the light, went close enough to the tent to read a large sign posted at the side of the road. It said:

  The EASTER HEALTH Crusade—

  Dr. B. Sam Johnson

  revivalist and healer

  tonight through Sunday

  only.

  On the platform, another man approached the pulpit. He wore a clerical collar, and a silver cross hung from his neck. He pushed his heavy glasses up on his nose, and beamed out over the people. “I’m pleased as punch,” he said, “to have Dr. Johnson and Matthew Logan here. They’re known everywhere in the state for their rich ministry to the spiritual needs of people like us. I don’t need to tell you how much we need reviving here—how many of us need to recover that healing faith,
especially in this Easter season. Dr. Johnson and Mr. Logan are going to help us return to the matchless Grace of God.”

  The short man dressed in black stood up again and said, “Thank you, sir.” The minister hesitated, then left the pulpit as if he had been dismissed—cut off in the opening stages of a fulsome introduction—and Dr. Johnson went on smoothly: “My friends, here’s my dear brother in Christ, Matthew Logan. You’ve heard his wonderful, wonderful singing. Now he’ll read the Divine Word of God for us. Brother Logan.”

  As he stepped to the pulpit, Matthew Logan’s powerful frame towered over Dr. Johnson. Though he seemed to have no neck at all, the head resting on his broad shoulders was half a yard above his partner’s. He flipped authoritatively through a massive black Bible on the pulpit, found his place, and bowed his head to read as if in deference to the Word of God.

  He began without introduction:

  “ ‘But if you will not hearken to me, and will not do all these commandments, but break my covenant, I will do this to you: I will appoint over you sudden terror, consumption, and fever that waste the eyes and cause life to pine away. And you shall sow your seed in vain, for your enemies shall eat it; those who hate you shall rule over you, and you shall flee when none pursues you. I will make your heavens like iron and your earth like brass; and your strength shall be spent in vain, for your land shall not yield its increase, and the trees of the land shall not yield their fruit.

  “ ‘Then if you walk contrary to me, and will not hearken to me, I will bring more plagues upon you, sevenfold as many as your sins. And I will let loose the wild beasts among you, which shall rob you of your children, and destroy your cattle, and make you few in number, so that your ways shall become desolate. I also will walk contrary to you, and I will bring a sword upon you, and shall execute vengeance for the covenant; and if you gather within your cities I will send pestilence among you, and you shall be delivered into the hand of the enemy.’ ”